More Hot Air About the Climate

It certainly is fun to watch the right-wing blogosphere get all giddy with excitement when a report comes out stating that the danger this century from climate change is not warming but cooling. This is from the National Post of Canada by Timothy Patterson.

In the sediment, diatom and fish-scale records, we also see longer period cycles, all correlating closely with other well-known regular solar variations. In particular, we see marine productivity cycles that match well with the sun's 75-90-year "Gleissberg Cycle," the 200-500-year "Suess Cycle" and the 1,100-1,500-year "Bond Cycle." The strength of these cycles is seen to vary over time, fading in and out over the millennia. The variation in the sun's brightness over these longer cycles may be many times greater in magnitude than that measured over the short Schwabe cycle and so are seen to impact marine productivity even more significantly.

Our finding of a direct correlation between variations in the brightness of the sun and earthly climate indicators (called "proxies") is not unique. Hundreds of other studies, using proxies from tree rings in Russia's Kola Peninsula to water levels of the Nile, show exactly the same thing: The sun appears to drive climate change.

Now this is all interesting and you need to read the whole article. At one point this scientist gets into quite a bit speculation and does not take into account the CO2 levels and volcano activity, but I don't really care to do scientific speculation when I don't know enough about it.

What's really interesting is that to the right-wing it's about politics and not about the climate. These wingnuts just love to jump on Al Gore. They get all smug and even one prominent blogger is already saying "I toldja so".

The weather and the climate are two different things.

The preponderance of deep thought on the right is, "My feet are cold, Al Gore is stupid."

It must be great to be so smug in the face of so much contradictory evidence.

Jim Martin